Tag Archives: Kino Klassika

For other people, anniversaries are a good excuse for a party. For Silent Londoners, they’re a great excuse for a screening. You will have noticed by now that 2017 marks 100 years since the Russian Revolution – there have been exhibitions, books and screenings all year. The year isn’t over yet though. There’s another event coming up in October that is more epic than the rest.

October you say? Yes, that October. On 26 October this year, Kino Klassika and the London Symphony Orchestra present Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece October at the Barbican Centre. This 1927 film charts, in its own often creative but always thrilling manner, the events of October 1917: the famous “10 days that shook the world” in which the Bolsheviks revolted against the Provisional Government, marched on St Petersburg, stormed the Winter Palace and prepared to build a new Soviet state.

It’s a magnificent, riveting film, thanks to Eisenstein’s electric direction – and the fact that the authorities gave him the run of the city to make it. You may already know the famous, actually quite harrowing, bridge sequence – but if you don’t, no spoilers here.

October (1928). Collection Austrian Film Museum, Vienna

If you have seen October before bear in mind that the film was banned in England and not shown here until 1934 – in fact there are still many censored versions going the rounds. This screening is the real deal, and not only is the film itself complete, it will be accompanied by Edmund Meisel’s original score, reconstructed by the Munich Film Museum and the European Film Philharmonic, and played by the London Symphony Orchestra. Not a night to be missed, if you possibly can. October still represents a dazzling highpoint of cinematic experimentation and sheer excitement.

Silent cinema was a revolutionary medium – bringing a world of news, travel, culture, art and storytelling to a mass audience, a working-class audience. This democratic art form changed the way we learned to look at ourselves and to tell stories about who we are, as well as sharing stories of fantasy, hope and change.

Therefore it’s appropriate that Kino Klassika’s year-long celebration of insurgency on film begins with a film that was both politically and artistically revolutionary: Sergei Eisenstein’s galvanising masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. The film screens next Friday, 17 February at the wonderful Regent Street Cinema, with a live score by Max Reinhardt the Instant Orchestra. It’s sure to be invigorating experience, and a wonderful way to kick off this exciting season A World to Win: A Century of Revolution on Screen, which includes films by Ken Loach, Jean-Luc Godard and Costa Gavras.

October (1927)

The season concludes with silent cinema too: a screening of the epic October: Ten Days that Shook the World, with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre on 26 October 2017, which is exactly 100 years to the day after the start of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Marx proclaimed that the proletariat had “a world to win”. On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Kino Klassika hosts a season of cinematic masterpieces from around the world, as well as workshops and curated talks, which investigate that impulse of profound change. The season will be hosted at London’s iconic Edwardian cinema hall on Regent St before a planned regional tour. The season explores the revolutionary spirit through the camera lens. It asks what these films can mean today.

Here is the full list of films in A World to Win screening at the Regent Street Cinema:

The Barbican is also commemorating 100 years since the Russian Revolution, with a series of first-rate screenings of great Soviet silents: A Sixth Part of the World, accompanied by John Sweeney, Mother, with music by Stephen Horne, and The New Babylon, with Shostakovich’s lost piano score performed by Sasha Grynyuk.

Last night I went to a silent film screening that was the very definition of upscale. It was strictly by-invitation-only I am afraid, but well worth reporting back from.

I spent the evening at the beautiful Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, courtesy of the Kino Klassika Foundation. It was a very glamorous affair and I won’t deny that there were canapés and saucers of champagne to kick off proceedings, and very nice too, but the centrepiece of the night was a screening of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, accompanied by Stephen Horne and Jeffrey Davenport. During the film, eloquently introduced by Ian Christie, the glasses were set down and the audience, as far as I could tell, were rapt, transported by the movie.

Battleship Potemkin at the Electric Cinema, Notting Hill

In fact it was wonderful to talk to the guests at the screening, some of whom had never seen the film in full before, others who had very evocative memories of watching Potemkin at home or school as children in the former Soviet Union. This week, the film was screening as art, rather then propaganda.

And that’s the point really. The Kino Klassika Foundation threw this shindig because it has big plans for Sergei Eisenstein, including an exhibition of the director’s drawings at GRAD, called Unexpected Eisenstein, a book, and app and a series of film screenings around the country. We’ll be hearing more from Kino Klassika in the coming year, as the Eisenstein in England project is unveiled. Meanwhile, you can visit the charity’s website to find out more, or perhap even make a donation.